MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

Well, it's time to go home for Christmas - yippee! Hope to see everyone soon. As a special treat for Christmas though I will leave you with one more embarrassing thing.... (thanks to Annabel for sending this to me - hours of fun!)

http://www.elfyourself.com/?userid=60671cb21082285269f878fG06121902

I would like to take this opportunity to point out to Stu's friends and family that, whatever claims he has to the contrary, I have had absolutely nothing to do with turning him into a physical wreck in the last 6 weeks. Not one bit. I am a really good influence...

Less is more...

... except when it comes to uses for Cabbage evidently. Cabbage in Korea is the King of vegetables, pickled with chilli and garlic being the favourite variety. However, I did not expect to find them used instead of flowers. Yes, I give you... Decorative Cabbages!!

Fortunately , the Christmas decorations over here tend to be a bit more tasteful, although how Seoul still manages to have power with streets that have this many Chrismas lights I don't know.

Embarrassing moment of the week: Oh yes, I didn't want to disappoint... I decided to go into a dress shop mainly for entertainment purposes as the frocks on display were beauties. I thought I'd just have a look and perhaps if they were cheap get a great fancy dress outfit. However, when I went in to the tiny shop stuffed full of dresses, I realised that I was the only customer in there, which meant I got the full attention of the lady running the shop. Much more attention that I would have liked as it turned out... I managed to get cajoled into trying on one of the less offensive items and it soon became apparent that she had a "less is more" approach to the changing room. She pulled a curtain across at the back of the shop to cover the window, but to my surpise there wasn't another curtain, so I had to get changed fully exposed in the shop, under closer supervision than I felt was strictly necessary, as she was taking my clothes from me and folding them up. I will certainly put more emphasis on underwear selection next time I go shopping! Thankfully no one walked into the shop which was particularly fortuitous as I was slap bang in the centre of the US army stomping grounds, and being caught literally with my trousers down by a load GI's would have been too much humiliation even for me!

Surreal moment of the week: Having dinner in a French restaurant in Korea with Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer playing on an accordian. Excellent. I couldn't believe my luck when, having looked for a nice quiet restaurant to recover from Saturday night with a nice steak, the second I raised the fork for the first bite of steak an accordian player appeared from behind a Christmas tree and played his entire repertoire stopping only as I put my fork down, and not before reaching a crescendo with a Christmas medley of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Jingle Bells. So much for Peace on Earth...

Up there in terms of surreal things was wandering into the canteen and seeing a large green things (dog? rabbit? who knows?!). That would of course be the company mascot... the fairly short company mascot. I'm just surprised that the mascot isn't a giant cabbage...

Chickens, foxes and shoplifters...

I have become pretty good at undestanding Konglish (apparently that's what Korean English is called, just in case you didn't get it), which manifests itself mainly in mixing l's and r's in the classic "flied lice" and "Jane Lawlings" kind of way, but also in my favourites of "Let's go to lunchie", "cake-ie" and "sandwichie". However, I really came unstuck when the team leader started talking about "chickens for the project", project "chickens" and generating "chickens". I nodded as usual and fixed my face into a "business face" whilst having hysterics on the inside. Then he wrote it down on a time plan and the light dawned.... of course he was talking about "Quick wins!". I suppose it was fortunate that it became chickens and not Quickie wins.

And so onto foxes. Was in a night club and and American guy had a dead fox which was pleasant (I guess it was an old fashioned stole). I was obviously delighted to find that it's mouth had a clip inside - great hair accessory!

Shoplifting... well it has been a while since I have done something embarrassing, so sure enough I was ready for a fall. I went into our little corner shop, which being part of a large chain of stores and having a card reader, I naturally assumed would take cards (every other place I have tried has taken cards with out the need to do the loitering, paying for other people's shopping manourve as previously mentioned). So, as she scanned, I packed... into my large handbag because they don't give you bags unless you beg for them... and then my card didn't read... so 3 different cards later, and no cash on me, I had to do the embarrassing thing of unpacking my bag (which is huge, full of assorted junk) and trying to make sure that I had found everything that I had stuffed in there, without uprooting any embarrassing items. And yes, of course there was a queue of people behind me. I'm sure people who had just walked into the shop though that this was a new western method of shoplifting. Oh the shame.

Shattered in Shanghai...

Being the glamourous jet setters that we are, we popped over to Shanghai for the weekend. Such was our excitement at meeting our colleagues Clare and Tom over there, we went out. All night. Bed at 8am and up at 10.30 to go to the very Chinese... Tony & Guy. I nearly had a close shave (or cut) by managing to do the nodding off herd jerk motion whilst sat in the hair salon mid cut. Fortune and strong coffee prevailed.

We had dinner on the 89th floor of the tallest building in Shanghai, with great if nauseating views over the city. However, far more stomach churning was the view inside the hotel if you looked from the top floor down to the foyer. I have to admit, I held the camera over rather than sticking my head over - didn't want the people in the foyer to experience my dinner after me.

To the right of Clare and I in the next picture, you can see the Pearl TV tower (just behind the wine bottles!) which very obviously looks like two dragons playing with a string of pearls. Well, after a dose of Chinese wine it may do. Couldn't see it myself. Or much else by 8am...

Shanghai was incredible though... much more dramatic than Seoul as they seem to have a competition to put something bizarre on the top of every tower block, and they are much taller yet more spaced out than Seoul (the tower blocks that is, not the people). We also saw a model of what Shanghai is going to look like in the future, although most of it is there already - this picture only shows about half of the model, but it is absolutely mind boggling, and makes docklands look a little bit... little.

In addition, we popped over the river from the skyscrapers and were straight into the old town. If anyone gets any Chinese Christmas presents from me, they were really, really expensive, and I couldn't haggle them down at all. Honest.

In the old town we also saw some seriously serious statues. This red one in particular looked like I do in our offices after a whole day of extreme office heating.

I especially liked these statues in a Chinese Temple we visited (you can see the size of the real peoples heads at the bottom of the picture). They reminded me of Odd Job from James Bond, Mr Ben, and I'm sure I've seen a Ronnie Barker sketch looking like the one on the left... (for a close up you can double click on the picture)

New friends, old friends, lookalikes?

High time to introduce our new celebrity friends from Busan, or so we could have the locals believe. So, from a Korean perspective we have... Meryll Streep, Summer from the OC (ok, the Korean's didn't actually say that but I think so), Anthony Hopkins and Renee Zellweger. Mmm. We're not so sure.

Not sure who Annabel looks like, Jim Carey perhaps, but she couldn't contain her excitement at visiting Seoul on a brief stop over between Brisbane and London...

Friday fun with dogs... Korean style

We haven't been here yet, but rest assured we are going to try to sniff it out... well done to Stuart for finding this gem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxLs8qPQz0A